Trog's sacrifices


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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 04:34

Trog's sacrifices

I've suggested twice before to remove sacrifices from Trog. I'm doing it again because I feel strongly about this.

I've played a few local games with berserkers and fighters joining Trog and simply ignoring the corpses on the ground and the games have played NO DIFFERENTLY than if I took the effort to sacrifice corpses. You know what has a MUCH bigger impact on your piety? Resting. Wearing a ring of regeneration is basically like wearing an amulet of faith with Trog... just to put things into perspective... there are so many factors that go into piety gain and loss and sacrifices are by FAR the smallest factor.

So when it comes down to it Trog sacrifices don't have any meaningful impact on your gameplay. You can toss around all the theories you want but honestly just play a few games with Trog and don't bother sacrificing anything. You can still spam BIA all you want to kill uniques and still get berserk and Trog's hand really quickly... nothing changes.

I'd go as far as to say not allowing players to sacrifice corpses and changing NOTHING else wouldn't be a nerf to trog but actually a buff since it doesn't make piety harder to gain and simply makes a-a-tab-tab-tab that more straightforward. You might think I'm exaggerating but I'm 100% dead serious: the higher your piety is the less likely you are to get piety gains off kills and sacrifices... so sacrificing corpses simply makes your next few kills less likely to give you piety... simply put SACRIFICING WITH TROG DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

So remove the feature please? It adds nothing to the game and confuses new players.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 11:27

Re: Suggesting This Again

snow wrote:I've suggested twice before to remove sacrifices from Trog. I'm doing it again because I feel strongly about this.


What arguments were made against your suggestion the first two times? Have you done anything to produce a counterargument? (I will assume not since you haven't even linked to those threads)

Repeating yourself louder isn't a reliable method for getting people to listen to your point (in fact it's better known for getting people to instantly disagree without even considering your case).

On the surface your case seems sound but it is clearly only one side of the argument; if you don't at least try to address the reasons why twice this has been turned down then I can't see it gaining any more traction. (Also the thread title really doesn't help, it's more "instant alarm bells" than "ooh, that might contain an interesting and controversial idea"...)
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 12:35

Re: Suggesting This Again

I don't know where the threads are now.

The responses have been a mix of people agreeing with me and people VASTLY misunderstanding how the game works on a fundamental level and staying stupid things like "spbe is good because you can sacrifice all the corpses and get your piety up quickly" when in reality spbe builds piety VERY slowly because you take more damage and have to rest more. I think at one point a few people agreeing with me brought up logs to help prove my point (you can apparently check at which point on average characters reach max piety with Trog).

I think my complaints might have lead to changes in the way sacrifices work (now you automatically move over corpses and it asks you if you want to sacrifice them). I think the most common argument against my stance is that, yes, I'm 100% correct in that sacrifices are pointless and tedious and add nothing to the game, but instead of removing them they want to improve them. At this point the talk tends to shift towards improving Nemelex and nothing gets solved.

I can't imagine any situation where there is a meaningful choice involved with sacrifices though and apparently no one else can either. It's pretty hard to prove a negative like sacrifices can NEVER be meaningful but even in a hypothetical situation where they are meaningful and interesting... do you want to contemplate over every corpse "do I want to sacrifice this?" It just adds headache and a micromanagement game that no one wants to play.

At the moment optimal play is: sacrifice nothing
If the optimal play was sacrifice everything you're not eating: no interesting choices, just tedium
If the optimal play was think about sacrifices and make interesting choices: players forced to play a tedious micromanagement game they hate when they just want to kill dudes
(Keep in mind this is coming from someone who loves the micromanagement in NetHack and doesn't see anything wrong with polypiling and dragging stuff to altars. Micromanaging should be something you do when you feel like it and not every few seconds.)

There is no way for sacrifices to be "fun" by any definition of the word. The closest solution would be to force EVERY corpse to burn up after your kills and thus make you rely on berserk less, acquire for food, or use sustenance... THOSE are interesting and fun choices, not "should I press p?" You'd be killing off trolls though if you did that.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 12:53

Re: Suggesting This Again

In my opinion, snow has a good point, but is too ideological about it.

There is no way for sacrifices to be "fun" by any definition of the word.

I think that corpse sacrifices are fun under Fedhas. It surely helps that there's a tactical effect and that the interface is light.
Last edited by dpeg on Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:03, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 12:55

Re: Suggesting This Again

I'm with you on this. Corpse sac really doesn't feel great right now; it's rarely your best way to gain piety (and I'm willing to believe it doesn't make any significant difference with Trog -- it's not like TrBe has any problem with piety) and there generally isn't meaningful competition for corpses anyhow. It's not like berserkers are using 'em for necro.

I'm actually not sure corpse sacrifices can be made compelling (oops -- dpeg ninjaed me with Fedhas, which he's right about). If it's not your main engine for piety gain, you just sacrifice whatever you don't need. If it's the only practical way to gain piety, however, you have the demonic/undead branches problem.

But I dunno; the devteam has been more thoughtful about it than I have. Totally agree on the topic of Trog, though.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:00

Re: Suggesting This Again

snow wrote:I think my complaints might have lead to changes in the way sacrifices work (now you automatically move over corpses and it asks you if you want to sacrifice them).

If you think I implemented auto sacrifice because of your complaints, you have a bigger ego than Walter White.

Anyway, you're not pushing any real argument. You'e just saying that you're right and you know better over and over. You're not giving any data and your testing methodology is subjective and egocentric.

Let's try some reasoning. You say that sacrifices do nothing. Yet, they give piety, which isn't nothing. Also, piety can be used for god powers, which are useful. Conclusion: sacrifices are useful. If you don't understand why, maybe you should try using Trog's powers more often.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:11

Re: Suggesting This Again

I'd go as far as to say not allowing players to gain piety from kills and changing NOTHING else wouldn't be a nerf to trog but actually a buff since it doesn't make piety harder to gain. You might think I'm exaggerating but I'm 100% dead serious: the higher your piety is the less likely you are to get piety gains off kills and sacrifices... so killing things simply makes your next few sacrifices less likely to give you piety... simply put KILLING THINGS WITH TROG DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:11

Re: Suggesting This Again

The higher your piety is the slower the gains are. If you sacrifice corpses you gain less piety from kills and it balances out to the point where sacrificing everything or nothing results in roughly the same piety gains. And I use BIA quite a bit and think it's the main reason why berserkers are so easy... I think people worry about that last star of piety too much and don't BIA as much as they should. So yes. Sacrificing corpses with Trog does effectively nothing. You gain roughly the same amount of piety in the long run as if you didn't sacrifice them at all.

Also Hix I think it's cute what you did there but I think you're forgetting that killing is basically required to win, only a fraction of your kills produce corpses, and you gain far more piety of kills than sacrifices regardless. So yeah... your attempt at being witty doesn't actually work. Also you need to kill to produce things to sacrifice. :p

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:16

Re: Suggesting This Again

One interesting effect of sacrifices that is sometimes brought up is that it encourages you to stick around and finish the fight when fighting a large group of monsters. If you run after killing half the dudes, then come back later to clean up the rest, the corpses of the first half will have rotted by then. Of course this is moot if sacrificing actually doesn't do much for piety, but I don't really know if that is true.

Also, Trog worshipers do need to eat a lot due to berserk, so there often is a little competition for corpses even without necromancy. But certainly not to the point that losing sacrifice piety becomes at all relevant to the decision whether to berserk. So I agree that this is not meaningful.

I agree that sacrifices are currently rarely meaningful for Trog (even if they actually do slightly increase piety), and support removing the interface hassle. Possibly kills should grant more piety or some other flavorful piety gain should be added, but Trog can take a nerf, so maybe it's not necessary. It would be a bit sad to lose some of the blood god flavor.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:22

Re: Suggesting This Again

Galefury, I feel Trog is a very powerful God and piety gain from kills shouldn't be increased with the removal of corpse sacrifices since the removal of corpse sacrifices won't change overall piety gains anyway. Hell even the removal of corpse sacrifices DID hurt Trog it wouldn't be a bad thing. Going Trog basically lets you glide effortlessly through what most people consider the hardest part of the game.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:23

Re: Suggesting This Again

I only meant to point out the bad argument you were making. The fact that there are diminishing returns on piety gains from sacrificing when your piety gets high doesn't mean that the usefulness of sacrifices drops in relation to killdudesing, since the same argument applies to the piety gain from killdudesing.

Basically, you seemed to be thinking that gaining piety from sacrificing hurt you since it made your next few kills give less piety, but that's just mathematically unsound. A piety point in the bank is a piety point, regardless of how you earned it.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:27

Re: Suggesting This Again

I am sure sacrificing corpses does actually increase piety. The only way this could not be true is if the piety decay during the additional time required to sacrifice the corpses offset the gain, and while Trog piety decays fairly quickly sacrificing does take very few turns. I'm sure the gain is offset by decay at some point (max piety means no gain at all, so at 200 piety sacrificing would indeed be completely worthless while out of gift timeout). What I don't know is how large the increase is. With Trog you are usually far away from max piety and often in gift timeout, so even if sacrificing wont increase piety much it will at least get you more gifts.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:33

Re: Suggesting This Again

They don't hurt you... it's just redundant.

1. On average if you don't sacrifice you gain the same piety as if you did sacrifice.
2. Sacrificing is tedious... in trunk you have to press o, y, o, y, o instead of just o, o, o while exploring and gain no benefit from it.
3. Even if I am wrong Trog is stupid powerful anyway and could use a nerf.
4. I don't think anyone would really miss sacrificing if it was removed.
5. Adding "interesting" choices to sacrificing would just annoy players... Crawl players tend to dislike micromanagement. I like it and have suggested sacrificing alternatives in the past but no one else likes the idea of thinking about sacrifices.

Galefury, sacrificing a corpse gives a very small chance of piety gain. The more piety you have the less likely you are to gain piety... so on AVERAGE OVER TIME the piety gains are the same as if you didn't sacrifice. To be fair though the largest factor in piety gains and losses by far is how much you rest... sacrifices are like a drop of water in the ocean.
Last edited by snow on Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:37, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:36

Re: Suggesting This Again

galehar wrote:Anyway, you're not pushing any real argument. You'e just saying that you're right and you know better over and over. You're not giving any data and your testing methodology is subjective and egocentric.


I think that snow's style has made you misjudge his arguments. I try to rephrase it for you:

He states that:
- sacrificing all corpses makes no change currently in Trog's gameplay: you will not see any difference in piety gain than sacrificing nothing.
- sacrificing is tedious.
- it's not a fun mechanic under Trog, which is hard to fix: if there's no decision what to sacrifice, it's just tedium. If there's a decision, it's also tedium, because it's decision where players (at least he) do not want these kind of decisions.

He did not talked about all sacrifices, especially he did not talked sacrifices under Fedhas (or Nemelex).

Tone is hard to confer for non native speakers (at least for me) in written text - please try to ignore it and focus on the arguments. This should be told to snow also of course.

Hix wrote:I only meant to point out the bad argument you were making...
I think he only wanted to demonstrate that piety from corpses are irrelevant. You can get about the same amount not sacrificing.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:41

Re: Suggesting This Again

I don't mind micromanagement with sacrifices and have actually suggested things like glow and hunger to be tied with sacrifices. The general response from other players is that they don't want to deal with that and think it would make sacrifices even LESS fun and MORE annoying. And yes when I say "sacrifice" I am only referring to Trog sacrifices in this thread.

With Trog, at the moment, corpse sacrifices are irreverent and should be removed. Attempting to make them interesting, or even remotely matter, is not something that most players want to deal with. It'll just be another thing like nausea, or equipping allies, or managing a dozen stacks of ammo or a dozen decks, or all that other stuff that just annoys players to the point where they refuse to use a certain combination or god because of how annoying it is.
Last edited by snow on Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:46, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:45

Re: Suggesting This Again

snow wrote:1. On average if you don't sacrifice you gain the same piety as if you did sacrifice.

This may be close to true, but I think it is mostly because of gift timeout, not because of the diminishing returns of piety gain. I am fairly confident that sacrificing diligently will get you more gifts. Please stop stating something that is almost certainly untrue over and over.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 13:59

Re: Suggesting This Again

It is true though. You gain much more piety off kills and any piety you do manage to gain off sacrifices just makes you gain less piety off kills and ends up being redundant.

You have a point about gifts though... in my tests I was just looking at how long it took me to get to max piety and by FAR the largest factor was resting... sacrificing or not sacrificing didn't effect the gains at all. Still I don't think the effect on gifts is even noticeable... though it's a hard thing to test considering you'd probably have to play through a few 3 rune games and that's like 2 to 3 hours a pop.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 14:41

Re: Suggesting This Again

The problem I have with your "average" argument is that you don't play the game "on average". You play the game linearly, and sacrificing will boost your piety earlier, which means faster access to abilities and gifts in the early game, which means better survivability into the midgame.

This is still a contentious topic, and there are good arguments on both sides. I just don't think this is one of them. It would be a lot more persuasive to propose an alternative that's not a direct nerf, which is what eliminating corpse sacrifices to Trog would be. It would be even more persuasive if the alternative reduced or eliminated interface tedium while maintaining power levels and enhancing flavor.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 14:52

Re: Trog's sacrifices

It's not a nerf to Trog as Trog plays exactly the same as without sacrifices. If it is a nerf it's a small one that's not noticeable and I don't see anything wrong with slightly nerfing one of the most popular and arguably strongest gods. I wanted to avoid tossing theories around like this and just have people play a few games without sacrificing so they could see first hand what I mean.

The difference seriously isn't even noticeable and the game feels much more fluid without them.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:01

Re: Trog's sacrifices

Instead of just establishing that sacrifices do nothing by fiat, post some examples.

Because I seriously don't believe you that not sacrificing has no noticeable affect on piety gain.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:02

Re: Trog's sacrifices

Fine, give me a bit and I'll do a quick game without sacrifices and post the results here.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:04

Re: Trog's sacrifices

I keep hearing about these 'tests'. Well, usually when people report on tests they've conducted they share the methodology they used, how they made their observations, what they used for samples...

Do you have any of this, or were you just playing some trog characters without sacrificing and it made you get a feel that the gifting was identical? If that is the case, how do you know you didn't get this feel because you were looking for it?
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:14

Re: Trog's sacrifices

I don't think actual tests or experiments are needed in this case. If snow played a few Trog games without sacrificing and the gameplay felt better and more fluid to him, that is a good argument already. Whether removing sacrifices makes Trog weaker or not is pretty irrelevant, Trog would surely be strong enough without them. The goal of crawl development is to make playing crawl feel better, and if removing sacrifices from Trog is expected to accomplish that (for most players, not just for snow) it should be done. Changes can be reverted later, too, and this early in the 0.12 development cycle there is more than enough time to do so.

Whether removing Trog sacrifices would improve the crawling experience of most players is another question of course, but I don't think it can be answered by "tests". The relevant arguments are usability vs flavor, and both of these are fairly hard to assess with numbers.
Last edited by Galefury on Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 09:14, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:24

Re: Trog's sacrifices

I just ran two tests: One MiBe ran through the first two levels not sacrificing anything. He died to poison at CLvl 3 on turn 1048 with 46 piety. The second MiBe sacrificed everything. By turn 1048 he was level 3 and had 62 piety and access to Trog's Hand.

I have no reason to believe that further tests like this won't prove out the same thing. You gain faster access to abilities and gifts if you dutifully sacrifice corpses as you go.

Sacrifices have gotten much less tedious over the years. You used to pray, which gave you the Pray status, then butcher corpses to sac them. Heck, Nemelex used to have a portable altar you toted around to sacrifice stuff. Now autoexplore takes you directly to stacks with sacrifice-able stuff, then asks you if you want to sacrifice it. The keys 'p' and 'o' are right next to each other, and even if they weren't, you can remap and macro things to your heart's content.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:32

Re: Trog's sacrifices

In trunk, there's an auto_sacrifice option.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:34

Re: Trog's sacrifices

I'm not buying the argument that diminishing returns means that getting sacrifice piety isn't strictly better than not getting sacrifice piety. Even if we pretend for the moment that diminishing returns somehow kicks in at exactly the right time to keep the character in question from getting additional weapon and ammo gifts, the fact remains that sacrifice piety will bootstrap your piety back up after a hard fight where you had to spend a lot of piety on Brothers in Arms and/or Trog's Hand. Being able to use Brothers in the next fight is better than not being able to use Brothers in the next fight, and sacrifice piety will reduce the amount of time spent between having blown your piety and being ready for action again.

Additionally, torching the bodies of the slaughtered is good flavor. Sacrificing Sigmund, Rupert, Nikolai, etc. makes the typical player feel extra smug and satisfied for having beaten them, and smugness and satisfaction are really great feelings that make the player want to play more in order to feel them again.

I'd very much like all corpse-sacrifice deities to be able to sacrifice all corpses on the screen at once, just like Fedhas, but removing sacrifices entirely goes a few steps too far. Trog, Okawaru, and Makhleb sacrifice should simply work on every corpse in LOS at once if it is used when no hostile monsters are in sight. One keystroke, and done. No inconvenience to speak of for those who don't like fiddling with item stacks, but the people who like the flavor can still enjoy it.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 15:39

Re: Trog's sacrifices

If the optimal play was think about sacrifices and make interesting choices: players forced to play a tedious micromanagement game they hate when they just want to kill dudes


Making interesting choices is by definition not tedium. Many, many games are available for players who want to "kill dudes" without having to make interesting decisions. If you'd like, I can recommend a few.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 16:00

Re: Trog's sacrifices

In testing I was looking towards getting max piety. Yes you'll get your first few stars a bit faster with sacrifices but my argument is for the long run when you have lots of piety and sacrifices give almost nothing and piety decays really quickly.

I understand that trunk has an auto_sacrifice though I must ask at this point: does a feature like Trog sacrifices need to be in the game? What does it add at this point? If it's just something that goes on in the background with auto_sacrifice that you never pay attention to then what's the point of it's existence? Does it balance anything that really needs to be balanced? Why exactly are sacrifices there in the first place?

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 16:45

Re: Trog's sacrifices

snow wrote:In testing I was looking towards getting max piety.


IMO, Trog piety has exactly one breakpoint: When can I use Brothers in Arms?

Sure, Trog's Hand is great and the gifts are important over the long haul, but having that first Ogre to airdrop on an OOD or unique is huge.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 16:58

Re: Trog's sacrifices

snow wrote:I understand that trunk has an auto_sacrifice though I must ask at this point: does a feature like Trog sacrifices need to be in the game? What does it add at this point? If it's just something that goes on in the background with auto_sacrifice that you never pay attention to then what's the point of it's existence? Does it balance anything that really needs to be balanced? Why exactly are sacrifices there in the first place?


I agree on this point. While I appreciate the effort spent to patch in auto sacrificing, I believe that most of the corpse gods would benefit from removing sacrifices and increasing piety on kills to compensate, or giving conditions where they give extra piety, like Oka with OOD kills. Trog could give extra piety for berserked kills, Lugonu could encourage banishment, etc..

IMO sacrificing makes sense with Fedhas (ecology, light interface) and Nemelex (though he still needs work).
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 22:32

Re: Trog's sacrifices

One way to handle Trog sacrifices is to have Trog automatically claim corpses the turn before they become rotten. You wouldn't have to be standing on the corpse or be in LOS or anything like that. Praying on corpses would still work though.
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 22:42

Re: Trog's sacrifices

In that case might as well give more piety for kills.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 22:50

Re: Trog's sacrifices

For Trog, it would make sense to give piety for corpse sacrifices when berserk. (If you never did that, try it, it's fun.) For that to work, piles with corpses should be highlighted (so you can easily spot them when berserk): for example having the corpse glyph on top, or with colour.

I believe that the flavour of corpse sacrifices is not given enough credit: many peoples, with many different beliefs, sacrificed corpses; some still do. It's true that sacrifices can be tedious but the OP hurt his cause with choice of topic name, falsely claiming that corpse sacrifice amounts to nothing and posing rhethorical questions of no value.

Thankfully, there are some constructive proposals on the matter; above is mine.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 23:01

Re: Trog's sacrifices

dpeg wrote:For Trog, it would make sense to give piety for corpse sacrifices when berserk. (If you never did that, try it, it's fun.) For that to work, piles with corpses should be highlighted (so you can easily spot them when berserk): for example having the corpse glyph on top, or with colour.

That sounds utterly awesome, both in flavor and gameplay terms. The only issue I foresee is that players may make their kills and then go berserk just to sacrifice the corpse (as suboptimal as that may be).
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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2012, 23:12

Re: Trog's sacrifices

dpeg wrote:For Trog, it would make sense to give piety for corpse sacrifices when berserk. (If you never did that, try it, it's fun.) For that to work, piles with corpses should be highlighted (so you can easily spot them when berserk): for example having the corpse glyph on top, or with colour.

I disagree as that would lead to unnecessary berserk just to gain piety faster. You would also need to haul every corpse to a single tile as you can only move a few spaces while berserked before it expires. Also, you would have to wait for exhaustion to end before you can pray again, which is a lot of stopping and resting. An alternative would be to have corpses be sacrificed automatically for anything you kill while berserked, but this shouldn't provide piety.

I believe that the flavour of corpse sacrifices is not given enough credit: many peoples, with many different beliefs, sacrificed corpses; some still do. It's true that sacrifices can be tedious but the OP hurt his cause with choice of topic name, falsely claiming that corpse sacrifice amounts to nothing and posing rhethorical questions of no value.

Right now it is optimal to sacrifice every corpse you come across if you don't need it for food. I certainly doubt people who practiced sacrifice did it to every rat and cockroach corpse they found. Also, I don't know much about sacrifice culture, but I always thought the sacrifice was the being's soul, not it's corpse.

Sacrifices should be special occasions in crawl. For instance, only allow uniques to be sacrificed. Or auto-sacrifice when killed using a god ability like berserk. Also, if there's ever some sort of tribal god added then it would be nifty to allow them to perform ritualistic sacrifices.
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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 00:02

Re: Trog's sacrifices

pubby: (a) Berserk is an expensive action: it takes a load of food, some piety and, more importantly, it is risky because of exhaustion. (b) I cannot imagine that hauling corpses in order to berserk-sacrifice them. (c) I agree that sacrifices would work better if they're special. That's why I made the proposal. The intention is that you can sacrifice what you just slaughtered if the enemies are dead and there's some rage left.

Not trying to shove my idea down anyone's throat but the proposal could be refined: Trog piety hit if you start rage without killing stuff.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 00:14

Re: Trog's sacrifices

I like the idea of making all kills while berserk automatically sacrificed to Trog. You're gaining great speed and power from your god at the cost of hunger and exhaustion. Want to refill your stomach? Do that on your own time!

Swamp Slogger

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 00:33

Re: Trog's sacrifices

Trogs Ritual of War-
Sacrifice a corpse. Takes X turns. Activates a buff that increases piety loss per turn, however vastly improves piety gain for kills. Maybe some other small buff(weaker potion of resistance eff).

And sacrificing corpses during Beserk to increase duration is a good idea as well.

Finally the idea that we had to automate something and now it's ok is silly. Even if snow is wrong about his number it doesn't really matter as corpse sacrificing is so pointless. I honestly believe that every god who has corpse sacrifice as JUST a way of gaining piety could be changed to not require it. It's a poor mechanic at best and automating it is just a bandaid. I mean at that point why not just have random piety gain every X turns?

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 01:11

Re: Trog's sacrifices

I dislike the charge that sacrificing is pointless. There are very few ways to interact with gods as it is. Certainly the piety gains can be shifted elsewhere, and some keystrokes eliminated, but I can't help but feel that it diminishes the experience of playing a character devoted to a deity.

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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 01:35

Re: Trog's sacrifices

I like the auto-sacrifice when berserk (with no sacrifice otherwise). It's flavored, reduce tedium and add a little more stress with berserk (you don't finish hungry and alone with a tenderloin steak on the ground).

If you want the sacrifice to be still active, then only available while berserk, and maybe add a little effect (a cloud of flame on the corps next turn, chance to frighten the enemies, the last sacrificed enemy comes help you in BiA...).

I don't think you need to boost the piety gain in both case, a slight nerf of Trog is acceptable because he is one of the most powerful God in early, and as said earlier, sacrifices piety gain is mostly relevant on early game.

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 01:39

Re: Trog's sacrifices

Eji1700 wrote:Trogs Ritual of War-
Sacrifice a corpse. Takes X turns. Activates a buff that increases piety loss per turn, however vastly improves piety gain for kills. Maybe some other small buff(weaker potion of resistance eff).


You want us to have to train a spare orc over to a place where we expect to have a big fight, every time we have a big fight? Really?

Dungeon Master

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 03:15

Re: Trog's sacrifices

Here is my proposal regarding Trog again (stuff not mentioned does not get changed), with some ##crawl-dev input:

(1) No more corpse sacrificing outside rage. "Trog is not interested in cold blood."
(2) Sacrificing while berserk is possible by chopping up corpses. "This feels good!"
(3) Piety hit for berserking but not killing something: "Trog is not satisfied."
(4) Bonus piety for actual blood created.
(5) No stabbing while berserk.

Spider Stomper

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 03:34

Re: Trog's sacrifices

Berserk sacrificing should spray chunks a la OOD.
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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 03:35

Re: Trog's sacrifices

pubby: (a) Berserk is an expensive action: it takes a load of food, some piety and, more importantly, it is risky because of exhaustion.

Berserk costs no piety and passing out is quite rare with high Trog piety. The food cost is less than what spellcasters deal with.

Sacrificing while berserk is possible by chopping up corpses. "This feels good!"

Right now berserk only allows butchering with edged weapons.

Piety hit for berserking but not killing something: "Trog is not satisfied."

Luring an enemy to the corpses you want to sacrifice is even more tedious.

No stabbing while berserk.

This is fine.

I like the auto-sacrifice when berserk (with no sacrifice otherwise). It's flavored, reduce tedium and add a little more stress with berserk (you don't finish hungry and alone with a tenderloin steak on the ground).

Not to mention you'll have to kill dragons without berserk if you want a hide. Kills when a BiA is summoned should also be auto-sacrificed too.

Another idea is to have Trog's hand involve corpses. It could be like that regain HP from death Ds mutation.
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Slime Squisher

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 05:34

Re: Trog's sacrifices

Trog's Hand requiring corpses would more or less kill Trog's extended viability. Running Pan/Hells without heal on kill or regeneration is not fun.

Vestibule Violator

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 10:00

Re: Trog's sacrifices

To eliminate scumming, piety could only be given for corpses chopped during the same berserk you killed the monster in (and no piety for corpses of monsters killed without berserk or during a different berserk). I think you should also be able to do this with a blunt weapon, though.

However, I think the rampage idea would be more interesting, and could be made to work with some changes:
1) After an enemy comes into sight, it is "new" for about 30 turns. Only enemies that can give piety for kills count.
2) Killing "new" enemies with no more than about 5 turns between kills counts as a killstreak, with Trog sometimes randomly revelling in the slaughter (this should probably be just a flavor godspeak message). From the third chained "new" kill onwards, further "new" kills give extra piety. Kill messages are colored in godspeak color during streaks to nonspammily indicate specialness.
3) To avoid incredible extra piety from special rooms and in zigs, diminishing returns would be desirable. This would have to be done independently of the streak to not encourage breaking one long streak into multiple short ones. For example, the extra piety per kill could be scaled by 3/(3+streaked kills), with the streak counter being reset 30 turns after killing something.

This would reward you for charging at a large group of enemies (also weak enemies) as soon as you see it and killing them as fast as you can. Possibly with berserk. Unfortunately it would require tracking when enemies first came into sight. No idea whether that is complicated.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2012, 16:18

Re: Trog's sacrifices

q) Sacrificing corpses while berserk either does not take time from berserk, or adds time to berserk equal to time to sacrifice corpse plus a value (0-X).
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Dungeon Master

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Post Thursday, 30th August 2012, 00:45

Re: Trog's sacrifices

galefury's rampage is cool (chaining kills) but I propose a refined version of rage-chopping, because it would be a simple modification.

1) No more sacrificing corpses under Trog.
2) Corpses from kills while berserk can be 'c'hopped when still enraged. This works with any weapon (or hands), gives piety, creates a lot of blood, has chunks spraying around (like disintegration) and increases rage duration like a kill would. Perhaps it should also be shorter than actual chopping.
3) Fresh corpses (created during the current rage) are highlighted: e.g. always on top of piles and in a different colour.

Flavour rationale: You are so berserk that you keep bashing them after death. Trog thinks that is good style.
Gameplay rationale: Replace tedious corpse sacrifices with a new option for berserk. You can use it for piety gain after everyone's dead but it's limited to fewer corpses than before. In addition, you may use it during a fight to increase rage duration, which is often short.

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Post Thursday, 30th August 2012, 01:06

Re: Trog's sacrifices

dpeg wrote:Flavour rationale: You are so berserk that you keep bashing them after death. Trog thinks that is good style.

TROG KNOW IT IS GOOD STYLE!!!
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Halls Hopper

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Post Thursday, 30th August 2012, 06:54

Re: Trog's sacrifices

dpeg wrote:galefury's rampage is cool (chaining kills) but I propose a refined version of rage-chopping, because it would be a simple modification.

1) No more sacrificing corpses under Trog.
2) Corpses from kills while berserk can be 'c'hopped when still enraged. This works with any weapon (or hands), gives piety, creates a lot of blood, has chunks spraying around (like disintegration) and increases rage duration like a kill would. Perhaps it should also be shorter than actual chopping.
3) Fresh corpses (created during the current rage) are highlighted: e.g. always on top of piles and in a different colour.

Flavour rationale: You are so berserk that you keep bashing them after death. Trog thinks that is good style.
Gameplay rationale: Replace tedious corpse sacrifices with a new option for berserk. You can use it for piety gain after everyone's dead but it's limited to fewer corpses than before. In addition, you may use it during a fight to increase rage duration, which is often short.


What about Spriggan and mummy berserkers? Spriggans can't afford berserking every time to gain piety and mummies can't berserk at all. And what happens in post-endgame, when there are no corpses?
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